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Chaos Follows Red Sox Into October

The Boston Red Sox, as you might have heard, didn’t finish the season quite as well as they might have hoped. Which is a nice way of saying that the team’s collapse actually was epic enough – and, perhaps more to the point, that the narrative environment surrounding the team is overheated enough – to warrant the “All The President’s Men” treatment that the Boston Globe gave to the season’s last, long days. It’s hard to escape the sense that this would be a non-story – at least beyond the fever swamps of New England’s sports-talk radio stations – if the Red Sox had tripped into the postseason with one more win, but it’s also tough to put a positive spin on losing 20 of 27 in September. The surprising part is that October seems as if it might shape up as an equally cruel month for the Red Sox.

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So now we know – the amount of time to wait before complaining about your general manager when he’s ended a nearly century-long curse is four years.

Manager Terry Francona has left the fold since season’s end. His postseason cameo in Fox’s broadcast booth during the American League Championship Series – he sat in for Tim McCarver – has drawn rave reviews and led to speculation that he could be just as successful in the booth as he was in the dugout during his Boston tenure. Francona’s departure became increasingly easy to imagine during Boston’s swoon, but the departure of general manager Theo Epstein never quite seemed feasible. Among most baseball fans, if not necessarily among the aggrieved rump of Sox loyalists lighting up local radio lines, the conventional wisdom was that the Boston-born Epstein had done too much to help the team win two long-awaited World Series titles, and was just too good at his job – give or take a few bad contracts – for the team to let him go.

All of which means that somehow, even with their season now well in the rearview mirror, the Red Sox are still somehow dominating the baseball discourse. Yes, Game 4 of the ALCS is on Wednesday afternoon, and will feature plenty of drama on its own: a pair of young pitchers, Rick Porcello and Matt Harrison, pitching the biggest games of their lives; a Tigers team trying to come back from a 2-1 deficit with a strained, sprained and limping lineup. It’s all very dramatic, and all also quite handily surpassed by the soap-operatics in Boston. After all, it’s just a ballgame. Boston’s story, on the other hand, is the epic tale of a franchise trying to remake itself – and save its legacy – on the fly. Well, that or it’s just a distractible sports media going daffy over the Red Sox again.

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This year’s Florida Marlins were effectively out of the National League East race by the time the weather started to get warm in the rest of the division, and they are far from most fans’ minds at the moment. Which is probably good news for the pitcher formerly known as Leo Nunez, who became one of the season’s stranger stories in late September. After three successful seasons as Florida’s closer, Nunez was abruptly placed on the team’s suspended list near the end of the season for reasons that were unclear at first. Once they became clearer, they remained pretty strange – Leo Nunez, it turned out, was not actually Leo Nunez. Leo Nunez was in fact a hometown friend of a pitcher named Juan Carlos Oviedo, and Oviedo borrowed Nunez’s identity in order to shave a year off his age in hopes of impressing big league scouts. (He declined to comment in the story and has not discussed the matter in the press. We’ll update with any comment from his agent.)

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Rock and roll has its share of enduring myths, but few are stranger – or, at least, few have more to do with the New Jersey Nets of the early 1990′s – than the story of Pearl Jam’s original name. As the story goes, Pearl Jam’s original name was Mookie Blaylock, a name they shared with an NBA point guard of some renown who asked them to change it, and that their breakthrough album “Ten” was a nod toward his jersey number.

As Bethlehem Shoals writes at Deadspin, the actual story is different (and notably dorkier) than all that, and suggests a pioneering basketball consciousness on the part of the world’s best-known over-emotive grunge-jockeys. “Maybe the title of Ten isn’t defiant, or an in-joke, but one last—and lasting—nod to the man himself,” Shoals posits. “Pearl Jam weren’t wishy-washy or half-poseur, they were ahead of their time. And they weren’t pulling random players out of a hat to mock sports. They had refined basketball tastes, and were just waiting for the rest of us to catch up.”

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Sometimes you get “Rocky” and sometimes you get “Rocky V,” but one way or another it’s likely that we’re going to keep getting boxing movies. For one thing, they work pretty well if done right. For another, the sport keeps turning up amazing and amazingly Hollywood-ready stories. Witness, for instance, the case of Dewey Bozella, an obscure fighter who will make his pro debut this weekend as part of a very high-profile night of boxing.

“After 26 years in New York State prisons, and two years after he was exonerated of murder, Mr. Bozella will make his professional boxing debut on Saturday in Los Angeles, at age 52, on the undercard of the light-heavyweight champion Bernard Hopkins,” Peter Applebome writes in the New York Times. “Mr. Bozella’s other fight, in which he is seeking compensation for the half of his life he spent behind bars, may be even more daunting than chasing victory in the ring. But for now, Mr. Bozella is focused on what he says will be his one and only professional bout.”

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It used to suck being a Red Sox fan because we always found a way to lose. Now I am embarrassed because everyone in the organization seems to have forgotten the life principle of personal accountability. Yikes

2:29 pm October 12, 2011

redsoxbelle wrote:

FYI - "Sweet Caroline" - as inappropriate as it often is - is played between the top and bottom of the eighth inning, not the seventh stretch.

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